A meticulously detailed, welcome addition to the literature of World War I, the “first ‘total’ war in which all the...
TV producer and writer Downing (Night Raid: The True Story of the First Victorious British Para Raid of WWII, 2013, etc.) recounts the complete transformation of warfare during World War I, the first industrialized war.
The author tracks innovations in aviation, code-breaking, the chemistry and engineering of weapons, medical breakthroughs and the birth of the art of propaganda. Gone was the idea of a gentleman’s war; spying and even chemical warfare were fair game. Those who felt things were “just not done” were overruled by the endless stalemate of trench warfare and brutality of chemical attacks. England’s scientific community successfully overcame pure science’s prejudice against applied science. With help from civilian inventors, they created airplanes that were capable of reconnaissance over the trenches. Within six hours of the declaration of war, the British cut five German cables in the North Sea and English Channel, forcing Germany to rely on wireless communication. Pure luck had handed British codebreakers three code books—one found by the Russians, one by an Australian and a third picked up by a fishing trawler. Each new invention led to another: Grenades demonstrated the need for steel helmets; chemical warfare required gas masks; planes flying recon needed aerial photography. With so many casualties, doctors needed to perfect quick fixes to return soldiers to the front, and there were vast improvements in blood transfusions, plastic surgery for horrific facial wounds, and psychology for shell shock. The greatest difficulty was convincing the Army officials; they obstructed, rejected and denied innovations that could have shortened the war. Tanks, the single most important tool in breaking the stalemate, weren’t used successfully until November 1917.
A meticulously detailed, welcome addition to the literature of World War I, the “first ‘total’ war in which all the resources of the state were involved.”Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1605986944
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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